Following Donald Trump’s visit to the Arab Gulf states, there was much commentary about a radical shift that the new-former US president allegedly introduced in US foreign policy, particularly toward the Arab region. The comments were based on Trump’s statements during the visit, particularly his praise for what he described as the remarkable successes of the oil- and gas-exporting Gulf regimes, and his insinuation that the primary source of their wealth is their skill in managing affairs. He accompanied his praise with his repeated assertion that he had implemented a radical shift in Washington’s foreign policy, such that America no longer lectures other states on democracy, or attempts to rebuild some of them on democratic foundations, in reference to US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In reality, the only period in modern history that witnessed a real, albeit limited, shift in Washington’s Arab policy was during George W. Bush’s first term (2001-2005) and the first half of his second term (2005-2009). The United States’ hubris at the height of the unipolar global hegemony that it experienced in the past century’s last decade, following the collapse of the Soviet system, resulted in the accession of the “neoconservatives” to power in the new administration. The neocons promoted a naive “idealist” policy that fantasized a replication of the role America played in rebuilding Western Europe and Japan on supposedly democratic foundations, but this time in the Arab region. In fact, the neoconservative ideology provided the Bush administration with a pretext for its continued occupation of Iraq, a pretext that gained greater importance when the original main pretext—the lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—collapsed.

Washington then embarked on an attempt to build a “democratic” system in Iraq that suited its interests, attempting to impose it on the Iraqi people through legislators of its own choosing—until the popular movement called for by the Shiite religious authority forced it to accept an elected constituent assembly instead of one appointed by the occupier. At that stage, in an effort to assert the sincerity of its intentions, the Bush administration, particularly through Condoleezza Rice after her promotion from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State, declared that the epoch of prioritizing authoritarian stability over the requirements of democracy was over, and the time had come to reverse the equation. This claim was accompanied by pressure on the Saudi kingdom, Kuwait, and Egypt to implement limited reforms. It quickly faded in Egypt when Hosni Mubarak, in the second round of the 2005 parliamentary elections, shut the limited democratic window he had opened in the first round, knowing that the Muslim Brotherhood would be the primary beneficiary. The results of the first round were sufficient to support his argument with Washington, which subsequently ceased exerting pressure on him.

The neocons’ whole “idealist” perspective collapsed as a result of the outbreak of the Iraqi civil war in 2006. The Bush administration got rid of the most prominent neocons in the second half of the president’s second term (2007-2008). It reverted to the course the United States had followed globally since the beginning of the Cold War. In the Global North, this course directed a democratic ideological discourse almost exclusively at the Soviet sphere (Washington welcomed the quasi-fascist Portuguese regime among the founding members of NATO in 1949, and the coup d’état in Greece in 1967 did not prevent this country from remaining a member of the alliance throughout the military rule that ended in 1974).

In the Global South, the “realist” course constituted the norm. Indeed, Washington played a key role in forcibly overthrowing several progressive democratic regimes and replacing them with right-wing dictatorships (perhaps the most famous of these numerous cases is the 1973 military coup against Salvador Allende in Chile). Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden have followed the same hypocritical course, whatever their claims. Indeed, the hypocrisy reached its peak under Biden, who in both 2021 and 2023 called for a “Summit for Democracy” that included prominent figures from the neofascist galaxy, such as Brazil’s Bolsonaro, the Philippines’ Duterte, and India’s Modi, not to mention, of course, Israel’s Netanyahu.

In the Arab region, Washington’s democratic pretensions since the Cold War era did not prevent it from sponsoring the establishment of a regime steeped in religious extremism in the Saudi kingdom while exploiting its oil wealth. Rather, it pushed for its tightening or re-tightening in the face of Iran’s 1979 “Islamic Revolution”. This was a point made by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a famous interview after assuming office, in response to a question about religious extremism in the Kingdom, which he had set out to dismantle. The pretext used by the United States and other Western countries with interests in the Arab region to justify their silence on despotism was “respect for local cultures”. This is the same pretext used by Donald Trump to justify his prioritization of US interests and his personal and family interests over all other considerations.

If Trump has introduced any change in the course of US foreign policy, it is in abandoning the democratic discourse that this policy had practiced in hypocritical combination with a “realism” that prioritized materialistic values ​​over all other values. Trump has thus abandoned one of the “soft power” tools America imagined it possessed over the entire world until his arrival in the White House. The neofascist course that Washington has adopted during Trump’s second term is no less hypocritical than before, however. Vice President J.D. Vance lectured liberal European governments on “democracy” in defense of neofascist forces in their own countries, and we have seen Trump himself rush to offer asylum to a handful of South African white farmers on the pretext that they were being subjected to genocide, a figment of his fellow white supremacists’ imagination, while inciting a real, indeed terrible, genocide in Gaza. The moral of all this is that hypocrisy has been the most prominent constant feature of Washington’s foreign policy over the decades and to this day.

Gilbert Achcar